


Achilles, Achilles come down

by TrenchcoatsandMisery



Series: Lazarus Rising [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF John, Developing Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Hurt John Watson, I'll get there, Immortality, John Watson Loves Sherlock Holmes, John is a Mess, John watson is immortal for a reason, Light Angst, M/M, Moriarty is Dead, POV Sherlock Holmes, Pre-Relationship, Redbeard - Freeform, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson Friendship, Sherlock Holmes Has Feelings, Sherlock Holmes Loves John Watson, Sherlock definitely doesn't know, Sherlock is a Mess, Sherlock-centric, Swimming Pools, Temporary Character Death, The Pool Scene (Sherlock), What reason?, is he a boy or is he a dog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:40:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26068849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrenchcoatsandMisery/pseuds/TrenchcoatsandMisery
Summary: The average amount of blood in a human is approximately 7 percent of their body weight. John Watson is around 154 pounds, which means his body holds around 4.9 litres of blood. The normal resting heart is 60 to 100 beats per minute. In stressed conditions, say, a devastating explosion, the heart rate increases and can get to as high as 150 beats per minute. The heart beats 6 quarts of blood per minute. Working off this, John Watson can afford to lose 40% of his blood (1.96 litres) before he enters hypovolemic shock. Bleeding out can take as quick as 5 minutes.This means that if Sherlock can’t reach John in the next few minutes he might die.Introdcuing mildly immortal John Watson and a very emotionally constipated Sherlock Holmes, this is the sequel to I just die in you arms tonight (again), where we find ourselves in the aftermath of John's supposed 'death'. You don't necessarily have to have read the first one, but it might help a little with the "John can't die" thing.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: Lazarus Rising [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1892485
Comments: 12
Kudos: 204





	1. Chapter 1

Something is wrong.

It is beyond the muffled sounds of a world turned upside down, the faint cries of an alarm. He can’t quite… the thoughts are coming too _ **slowly**_ , molasses rather than oil smeared across the cogs of his brain. He can’t think, he can’t organise or gather or deduce but most importantly 

He  
Can’t  
Think.

He may have been on the edge of the blast radius, but it was enough to throw him against the tiling. The dull thud of a headache, a concussion in the works, could explain why he can’t quite seem to focus, but that’s not what’s _wrong_. There’s a feeling in his gut, and it takes him far too long to remember that he’s experienced something similar, years ago, during the heights of Mycroft’s enforced detox. It had been shelved, unlabelled in the basement of his mind palace as it sat gathering dust, his time better suited to cracking the rehab centres main door code then identifying the sensation. At this moment, however, with his heart rate and perspiration levels elevated, his mind starts to catch up to the cortisol that is currently flooding through his veins.

The feeling, it seems, is fear. A deep, overwhelming feeling of fear.

_The average amount of blood in a human is approximately 7 percent of their body weight. John Watson is around 154 pounds, which means his body holds around 4.9 litres of blood. The normal resting heart is 60 to 100 beats per minute. In stressed conditions, say, a devastating explosion, the heart rate increases and can get to as high as 150 beats per minute. The heart beats 6 quarts of blood per minute. Working off this, John Watson can afford to lose 40% of his blood (1.96 litres) before he enters hypovolemic shock. Bleeding out can take as quick as 5 minutes._

This means that if Sherlock can’t reach John in the next few minutes he might die.

He is the unexpected variable, the anomalous result, the blip in the data. Of all the people Sherlock has met in his life, placated and antagonised, John is the first who has been more than just a passing stranger. He has lived with him, killed for him, aided in his investigations and now-

Now he’s died for him.

For a moment, Sherlock sees his future. Not in any moment of clarity, or religious experience, but in a rush of sheer statistics. _The relapse rate for substance abuse can range anywhere between 40-60%. With the added stress of John’s death, the ensuing emotional fallout and organisation of the funeral arrangements (because truly what would dear, alcoholic Harriet do), the probability of him relapsing is 58.5%. The chances of Mycroft attempting to fix him are around 75%, plus or minus 10% depending on the amount of contact and how hard he works to hide it. Nearly a third of opioid deaths result are from heroin and without a doctor as a flatmate, death is only an inevitable en-_

John wouldn’t like it though. In fact, he wouldn’t **allow** it. And Sherlock hates giving in to his demands, hates how this one man thinks he has any power over his actions. Watson compromises his experiments for the sake of ‘hygiene’, smiles at all of Lestrade's jokes, smoothes over the ruffled feathers Sherlock leaves in his wake effortlessly, without even asking. But John also lets Sherlock store parts in the fridge, calls him brilliant, thinks he's someone worth fighting with and for.

So.

Sherlock rises to his feet, ignoring the ringing in his ears, the persistent throbbing of his skull. His steps are stilted at first, lengthening into strides as he spots the first swirls of blood in murky water. They falter again as he scans the debris-littered pool, eyes catching on the corpse floating face down amongst the chaos. 

John.

He forces down the shudder that threatens to bring him to his knees, keeps his chin high, but his hands are shaking as he jumps into the water and pulls _it_ out.

Pulls John out.

Pale blue eyes, glazed over with the film of death, stare unseeingly up at him. He’s soaked through, chest concaved, bone peeking through skin and cloth. Red stained, slick, blood and viscous dripping from the controlled destruction. A hand, his own perhaps, brushes wet hair back from a pale and cold forehead.

John Watson is dead. 

And then

He isn’t. 

Sherlock had asked him once, on a boring rainy evening, why he thought he had survived the war when hundreds of young men had died by his side. It was an admittedly cruel question, but some disagreement or other had prepared him to test the lines both men had drawn on the first day of moving in. He found himself disappointed, as the conversation itself wasn’t particularly enlightening. After months of tracking the good doctor’s behavioural patterns, it was easy to predict that upon any mention of war, the man exhibited anxiety, anger and often, if pressed, disassociation. On this particular day however, before he could move from anger to disassociation, John did something peculiar. Looking up from the newspaper in his hands, he smiled, that strange baring of teeth he often did right before a fight. 

“I’ve found, over the years, that I’m particularly hard to kill.”

Sherlock had thought that it was a comment on his stubbornness, perhaps a flicker of the religious spirit that had been pressed upon a younger John Watson. Watching the blood ooze slowly back into the wounds, bone retreating and snapping back into place, flesh knitting together suggests a far more literal use of words. Those blue eyes _flickering in the candle light of that booth, warm with wine and adrenaline, the curve of a clever smile, nodding along thoughtfully actually listening to the deductions_ still vacant, until with a cough, heart kicking back into motion, back arching as he sucks in a breath.

John Watson lives again.


	2. A boy and his dog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock sorts through some relevant memories and struggles to deal with the aftermath.

Sometimes, in the darkness, he drowns.

Everything becomes too much, the roar of a thousand words, the sting of a thousand more. There is no peace in the darkness, not from the deductions and the data and the _knowledge_ of _days and months and years and people_ all piling around him. On the nights he drowns, he sinks, **_deepdeepdeep_**. Down into the depths of his memory palace, in search of something else. Something quieter. If he cannot find silence, peace in the cold waters, surely he can find gentler tides.

Instead, he finds the death of Redbeard.

Years ago, before he became intimately acquainted with the slide of a needle into paper-thin skin, before the oiled words and tainted hands of Sebastian Wilkes and his sort ever got a-hold of him, Sherlock Holmes was a child. People forget that. _He_ forgets that. No matter how far he stands outside of society and their bumbling rules, he is not above the biological timetable. And this child that he once was, wild-haired and wild-eyed, had a dog. It would be idiotic to ignore the fact he had parents, a rather tiresome older brother and a nanny as well, but it was the dog that mattered.

His name was Redbeard and he was everything.

As a child, Sherlock’s particular brand of strangeness was easier to pass off, slipping through the cracks in the guise of being just another ‘troublesome’ child. His strangeness was still strange, however, and while disregarded by adults, children have a certain capacity for cruelness hidden within them. They did not like weakness, hunted it in fact, could smell it seeping from the pores of the quiet and the peculiar. Young Sherlock Holmes, who had not yet perfected the art of masks and shields, positively _oozed_ the scent. Biting words bit deep and held on, leaving scars that were only ever visible to him yet somehow would last a lifetime. There was a time before, where a boy similar to him in mind and biological data would have dulled the pain. But Mycroft left him, as most people do, and loneliness set in.

But Redbeard? He put a stop to that in moments. With a hound at his side, battling against the sea and the troublesome men who sailed it, things like the hollowness in his chest or the blank looks in his classmate's eyes didn’t matter. Children were stupid. Brothers, who would rather experience the tedium of university then play pirates, were boring. Parents, spending more and more time tolerating his presence rather than actively seeking it out, were tiresome. Redbeard, on the other hand, loved him and would rather walk the plank barking happily at his side then abandon him.

A long time ago, there was a boy and his dog, who lived happily together. And then the dog died.

The lifespan of the average Irish Setter is between twelve to fifteen years. Redbeard lasted ten, five of which he spent in Sherlock’s company. He woke up one morning to his parent's worried faces and a fumbling lie that the dog had been lost. He had suggested mounting a rescue mission, sending out search parties, anything other than sitting inside and dealing with the drawn and anxious expressions people kept casting him. It wasn’t until Mycroft, having driven down specifically for the occasion, sat him down and told him that Redbeard was not coming back that the urgency and manic energy of the day bled from him. The memory is… difficult to recall. Its room in the palace of his mind is dark and dusty, the names and places and faces within shrouded in faded cloth coverings that coming apart at the touch. Everything lacks _details_ , and that makes it hard to hold onto, slipping between his fingers. But he remembers the words he’d sobbed into his brother’s chest, whispered into the dirt of the dog’s empty grave.

They never let him see the body. They should have let him see the body.

No one understood of course. His pleas to see the beloved and deceased Redbeard were met with varying reactions. Mummy and father assumed the interest was morbid in nature and shushed him when the subject came up. It was unseemly, to want to examine your pet’s corpse, especially when one had not shown any emotion towards the death beyond irritation. Mycroft, however, believed it to be sentimentality. In some attempt to be understanding, he made a great deal of fuss about how sentiment was a reasonable emotion to have at such a time. Sherlock’s strong objections to the matter meant that Mycroft eventually gave up, leaving his younger brother alone after once more his concerns had been brushed aside. Caring, after all, was not an advantage. His real motive was far more complicated than both of these.

To find it, you must first understand the importance of _Turritopsis dohrnii_.

Originating in the Caribbean Sea and the Mediterranean, at first glance they didn’t appear much. This bell-shaped jellyfish though, with a maximum diameter of around 4.5 millimetres and as tall as it is wide, was the driving force behind his desire to access Redbeard’s body. The secret behind his fascination lay in the fact they were biologically immortal. Able to bypass death in its entirety, scientists had already begun to investigate their part in restoring and replacing dead tissue in humans. If he could only get his hands on the body, get his hands on a Turritopsis specimen, then it wouldn’t take long until he could bring him back. Till he wasn’t alone again.

That didn’t happen of course.

Somewhere out there was the body of his closest friend.

_Pale blue eyes, glazed over with the film of death, stare unseeingly up at him._

70% of the animals hit by cars are dogs. The chances that his trusted companion was rotting by the side of the road, forever waiting for him, were high.

_Red stained, slick, blood and viscous dripping from the controlled destruction._

His parents could have found the body, but the empty grave begged the question… why? Why hide the corpse, what could have been so strange or so horrific that they couldn’t even give their son the reassurance of a funeral?

_Watching the blood ooze slowly back into the wounds, bone retreating and snapping back into place, flesh knitting together._

He was alone.

_a cough_

He would be for sometime

_heart kicking back into motion,_

Until, decades later, John.

_back arching as he sucks in a breath, and he is alive. John Watson is alive, wheezing in deep and quick breaths, scrabbling at Sherlock's shirt until the collar is gripped in his fists. Fear, an expression that he is not used to seeing on the brave doctor’s face, shines bright in the man’s eyes. The rush, the roar of blood in his ears drowns out (always, always drowning) whatever John is saying until a sharp smack of pain brings everything into clarity again. John is shaking him lightly now, and the words are back, though he’s still not certain he’s understanding them._

_“Sherlock, listen, Sherlock c’mon. You can’t tell anyone, please, Sherlock, listen to me. Are you listening?”_

_He nods, or at least he thinks so. Maybe he makes a sound, or maybe he doesn’t, but either way it must be enough for John because he’s going again._

_“You can’t tell anyone, Sherlock, promise me, no, you can’t. The police are going to be coming, you must be listening, they’re going to come and we’re going to tell them the bomb went off when I was standing with you.”  
And there’s so much blood, on the ground and on him and on John. But this can’t be right, because how can there be so much blood while John is alive and awake, he must be missing something. The data is skewed and wrong and nothing is right, but John is looking at him like there’s something he’s supposed to say. Blood dripping, bone splintering, body healing, over and over. Moriarty grinning, the flash of light, Johnjohn **johnjohnjohnJOHN**_

“SHERLOCK.”

He jolts awake, with a gasp _(back arching as he sucks in a breath)_. The cab he sits in has come to a stop, and John is sitting beside him. There’s concern on his face, ash in his hair, and there’s a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder.

“We’re here. You, uh, you were saying my name. In your sleep.”

Was he? It doesn’t matter. It never really matters. He shrugs the handoff.

“It was nothing.”

He gets out of the cab, striding to the door, leaving John to pay. He climbs the stairs, ignores Mrs Hudson who hurries out to greet him. A tea set falls to the ground, and dully he remembers the blood, ash and chaos of his clothes. It doesn’t matter. Into the apartment, into his room, closing the door. Sinking to his knees in a cold and empty room.

_A short time ago, there was a detective and his doctor, who lived happily together. And then the doctor died. And then, he came back. Nothing was ever the same again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Redbeard? Dog or boy? ;)
> 
> Hope this is clever enough for y'all. Come yell at me, good or bad, however you feel.

**Author's Note:**

> I, like a fairly famous consulting detective, have returned from the dead. Please, go easy on me, this is my first time writing as sherlock and I did try to do him justice. I'm hoping to write more of this, make it a 5+1 thing, but at the moment I'm keeping it a oneshot just so you can have that insight into the aftermath a lot of you asked me for. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy it! Feel free to leave me cryptic clues, or simply tell me what you liked or didn't like about it.


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